In the movie Eat, Pray, Love its described as the sweetness of doing nothing.

Dorian, having a hard time relaxing

This morning after a walk and the dogs’ breakfast, this “little” puppy have been on speed, doing pretty much everything he’s not supposed to. Very puppy-like, in other words. Sometimes, just like with us humans and especially kids, when a puppy is tired beyond the need of sleep there’s no end to the mischievousness, playing, barking and what have you.

Part of my Dolce far niente – a cup of coffee

I’ve been cool about it, there’s no need to do anything as long as the dog and us around him are safe. He’s been chewing on an old basket ball, trying to play with a not-at-all-interested-cat, wrestling with the older dog, barking at… who knows what, wanting to cuddle, almost falling asleep, barking, chewing, wrestling, looking for other things to chew or eat… and finally, after three hours of being active, he was ready to rest. Almost. And then really, sleeping.

Relaxing AND ready to get up and bark

Why I find this so interesting is that I recognize myself in this behavior. When I need to rest or sleep but keep myself busy with things like a child not wanting to go to bed. As kids we usually don’t want to miss out on anything, and as grown ups… we think we need to do things or be awake and alert because…? Well, we all have our reasons and explanations. Personally I’ve become far better at Dolce far niente lately and love those days or hours. This is the first real day of Dolce far niente since arriving in Sweden almost three weeks ago. It’s wonderful!

See! He relaxes in such a sweet style!

What I usually say is that animals (when they’re not speed-puppies) are great to help us remember to do what we want/need the most. If a dog/cat/horse needs to rest, they do. Or eat, go pee, yawn, stretch, run, jump, shout… basically whatever.

So, what have we been doing the past week since we arrived to this beautiful island of Flores, except learning about how the grocery shopping works here?

After 30 minutes nonstop uphill

Well, we have done a lot of small things, and yet not so much. It depends on how you look at it. After being travelers, moving from place to place for almost six months, we’ve learned that to us it feels nice to take it rather slow and let ourselves settle in the first few days in a new place. We prefer to stay around the house, do small things and rest a lot before making big trips and going on heavy hikes.

Laundry drying in the wind

Especially here, where we will stay for a couple of months, there’s no rush in doing things like exploring the island and so on. So we have slept in, been sitting in the sun (sometimes for hours, other times a few minutes), taken Lucky the dog for walks, done laundry, waved to the neighbors ;-), watched the Atlantic, cleaned the windows, climbed some hills, watched movies, talked about the meaning of life, done push-ups and yoga, cooked food and done some e-mailing.

Recycling bins outside our house

It’s been interesting to see how the old thoughts and patterns of “we should drive off to some new place”, or “isn’t it something we need from the store” have come up from time to time – some type of restlessness and demands on being “a good person who’s interested in things”. Since we want to take the period we’re here to let ourselves sink even deeper down into ourselves, our innermost wants and relax from all the should-have-could-have-would-haves, we help each other to see those patterns and also allow ourselves to break those habits.

Amazingly beautiful flowers found on a walk

It’s not like we have tons of things we have to do, but it seems like the human brain loves to play games of making up whatever to make us do rather than to be, we like to follow the flow and listen to what we really want to do from moment to moment, from day to day. This is a time-out for us, and we allow us to be one as well.

A lot has happened and at the same time not so much in the past couple of weeks.

We’ve been busy with the two dogs we have at our current house sit, and the first week here we even had another house + pets parallel to this one.

Morning walk with Bunty and Boo Boo

So the past weeks we’ve taken long walks daily and Wivan have continued the work out routine she started early this year. Anders has been resting a lot since his shoulder got dislocated almost three weeks ago when we were snowboarding/skiing in the mountains. He’s now feeling a lot better and the body seems to heal well. Cross our fingers for him to be fully recovered in a few more weeks.

Hot chocolate in the afternoon sun

The past week we had our first visitors from Sweden since we started our tour in November. Our niece and nephew came to stay with us and we’ve done some sightseeing in the area, visited one of the local markets, had fika and talked about life. One day we even went across the border to Spain over the day.

Daytrip to Vielha in Spain

Now it seems like we’re finally landing a bit more steadily in our new way of life. It’s taken somewhat three months to relax deeper and to see/hear/feel the spinning thoughts slow down one at a time. Every day there still comes thoughts like “we should this or that” or “we probably need to do this” and every day we remind ourselves that there are very few things we actually have to do or that needs to be done this very minute. Instead we like to play a bit more and continuously ask ourselves what we’d really enjoy doing at this moment, or what we’d love to do next and go from that instead of should/would.

It’s great to have the time to explore deeper within our own habits and thought patterns, what type of thinking that creates our beliefs and feelings in certain moments and to also have the ability to choose differently.

Who are we?

Since selling our house in Sweden and leaving our jobs in November 2014 we’ve been traveling, house sitting and exploring the world in different ways. At the moment we are located in Sweden, and expect our first child in February 2018.

By sharing parts of our journey we also share insights about life, people and places. We hope that our story and experiences might inspire others to find out what their dreams are and start acting upon them.

We believe it’s possible to make dreams come true!

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